e Greenwood of the
Philadelphia _Press_ it received nationwide notice.

Congress, however, gave little heed to women's demands. "The
experiment" of woman suffrage in the District of Columbia was not
tried and nothing came of the resolutions for universal suffrage
introduced by Pomeroy, Julian, and Wilson. In spite of all Susan's
efforts to have the word "sex" added to the Fifteenth Amendment, she
soon faced the bitter disappointment of seeing a version ignoring
women submitted to the states for ratification: "The right of citizens
of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous
condition of servitude."

The blatant omission of the word "sex" forced Susan and Mrs. Stanton
to initiate an amendment of their own, a Sixteenth Amendment, and
again Congressman Julian came to their aid, although he too regarded
Negro suffrage as more "immediately important and absorbing"[233] than
suffrage for women. On March 15, 1869, at one of the first sessions of
the newly elected Congress, he introduced an amendment to the
Constitution, providing that the right of suffrage be based on
citizenship without any distinction or discrimination because of sex.
This was the first federal woman suffrage amendment ever proposed in
Congress.

Opportunity to campaign for this amendment was now offered Susan and
Elizabeth Stanton as they addressed a series of conventions in Ohio,
Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Press notices were good, a
Milwaukee paper describing Susan as "an earnest enthusiastic, fiery
woman--ready, apt, witty and what a politician would call sharp ...
radical in the strongest sense," making "radical everything she
touches."[234] She found woman suffrage sentiment growing by leaps and
bounds in the West and western men ready to support a federal woman
suffrage amendment.

* * * * *

With a lighter heart than she had had in many a day and with new
subscriptions to _The Revolution_, Susan returned to New York. She
moved the _Revolution_ office to the first floor of the Women's
Bureau, a large four-story brownstone house at 49 East Twenty-third
Street, near Fifth Avenue, which had been purchased by a wealthy New
Yorker, Mrs. Elizabeth Phelps, who looked forward to establishing a
center where women's organizations could meet and where any woman
interested in the advancement of her sex would find encouragement